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Ant writes "Popular Mechanics mailed a bunch of sensors on an epic journey to find out which American shipping company is the most careful with your packages. From the article: 'One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked "Fragile" or "This Side Up." The carriers flipped the package more, and it registered above-average acceleration spikes during trips for which we requested careful treatment.' Here's what they found."

Sure, but also take a look at the top researchers in American schools. They are Chinese, Indian, and Russian. Whats troubling is the lack of American kids doing the research these days. Many of the universities in China and India are ultra-competitive, those students have a lot more competition being that their countries only contain over 2.5 billion people combined. You may laugh about how India churns out all those undergrads with research skills, but you probably didn't laugh when your job was sent overseas to somebody who can do the same work cheaper.

America needs to invest in its education on ALL LEVELS, or the gap between the educated and the ignorant will continue growing and the USA is going to be on the losing end of that battle.

As other countries invest in education, we war monger and fund political campaigns. Our GDP should be spent on research, and education - not on war, and not on foreign oil. That is the only way to ensure long-term financial solvency in the US. Take for example the great space race of the 1960s, when Kennedy challenged this nation to reach for the moon. We educated ourselves and built up US industry and improved our GDP. And then we got to the moon, and became complacent. We need a new challenge for the 21st century. If Obama challenged the US to become energy sufficient - to not rely on foreign sources of energy, and backed that up with providing money for research to make the next generation technology today's technology not only would we invest in our future with education, but provide us with the cost savings in energy to actually bring down the national debt.

Meanwhile the ice caps are melting and congress is too full of itself to even come up with a climate bill. For shame on us, we should all look to India and China for inspiration, not incompetency.

tekgoblin (1675894) writes "Verizon Wireless had somehow been charging customers extra money on their bills for data that they actually hadn't been using. Approximately 15 million customers were affected by the erroneous billing error. According to BGR the FCC had been pressuring Verizon to resp0nd to the hundreds of complaints that had been piling up. So Verizon's answer was to refund all of the overcharged money as soon as possible."Link to Original Source

angry tapir writes "More than 40 percent of the world's spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec's MessageLabs' division. The Rustock botnet has shrunk since April, when about 2.5 million computers were infected with its malicious software that sent about 43 billion spam e-mails per day. Much of it is pharmaceutical spam."